HamiltonLagrange

Hi! It's been awhile since I've been on this forum. I had an idea which I think would be a really useful tool for people to use. I don't know how many of you have tried to sit down and read real legislation, but, it's really dense, difficult to understand, and even if you know what the individual words mean, trying to interpret their real meaning, in full, understanding their loopholes, weaknesses and problems, is one heck of a feat!

Normally, before one can really understand the way that laws are written, you need to have had training as a Lawyer... but these days, that training requires you to fork out close to $100,000-$400,000 total before you can complete that training, once they make it out of that training, most people find that they have dismal job prospects.

We have this concept in computer science of a transcompiler. It's simple, you take something that is written in one language and you transcribe it into a brand new language. An example of this is "f2c", which translates fortran code to c. We have AI programs which attempt to understand human language in all of it's subtleties. There even exists e-discovery software, which can read and analyze legal documents, in a fraction of the amount of time that it would take for a human being to do it. It's used as a legal tool in court cases... I was thinking that one could actually write a transcompiler for the hybrid of English and Latin, which is our Legal-lexicon, and common English.

Knowing that laws come out every day written in this speech that most people can't really understand is a real problem. Software like this could fix that problem, particularly if it was paired with an analysis tool that can summarize points, gists, etc...

What do you folks think?

Where can I find assets for games?  I'm looking for models, errant source code, music, sound, etc.  

For those who produce models; I know that many use Blender to produce models on their own.  Where can I find other people's models that are free?

For sounds, I know that libraries exist; are there any that are public domain; free?  

I can program.  I can create a game engine, I'm looking for material that can fill the game that I make with substance.  Do most people who work on these projects on their own just produce their own models, music, and sound?  Is it some kind of a faux-pas to ask about material like this?

If you can answer these questions, I would be grateful.

As the title suggests, I'm looking for resources like 3d models, sound clips, music. Push comes to shove, I could probably compose my own music (spending several hours per piece on garageband), but I'd really rather spend more time on the engine, if I can find other music I can use without the threat of impinging on copyright it'll be preferable. I neither have the interest nor the equipment to generate my own sound clips, so I'd be relying on someone elses too. I'd like to write my own game for fun and if it's decent, maybe even profit . I'm more than willing to write my own engine complete with graphics pipeline, physics (this'll have potential to get really advanced; incorporating Relativistic transformations), music and sound handling. My pocketbook is about as deep as an average episode of Family Guy. (Which is to say, not at all).

The main platform I'd be using for the graphics handling and rendering is OpenGL; although I've considered writing a cannibalized version of POVRay to handle the rendering. (This would be necessary because POVRay is designed for PhotoRealistic Images, and has realistic ray optics and can handle realistic reflection and refraction, and because PhotoRealistic images are computationally expensive to create, and I need something to render scenes interactively (Generating at least 60 frames per second); hence, I'll need to hack it).

I should probably state that POVRay is opensource and that altering it's code (hacking it), is legal.

I'm probably biting off a bit more than I can chew, but I'm motivated and at the very least I'll learn enough from working on this project to be a dangerously good programmer. (That's the goal)

I'll welcome any constructive advice/criticism.